MOTHERBOARDS
Now we turn to our budget-specced
motherboard of choice: the Gigabyte
AB350 Gaming 3. Ryzen is an absolutely
revolutionary product, chipset and all.
Just how far it’s shifted the processor
industry is something we may never
know, but the fact that you can now
invest in a quad-core i5 equivalent for
less than $100 certainly makes it a force
to be reckoned with.
Couple Ryzen with Gigabyte’s
fantastically well-designed AB350
Gaming 3, and you’re quickly on your
way to speccing out one hell of a budget
rig. Gigabyte has long impressed us with
just how much it can cram onto a
motherboard, while still hitting
aggressive price points, and the plucky
underdog often wins our motherboard
group tests, purely because of its crazy
design ethos.
There’s a whole heap of mobos
available for Ryzen, however if you’re
after a no-fuss, plug-and-play build, the
AB350 is great. This board isn’t for
tweakers – you can’t overclock it – butGIGABYTE AB350 GAMING 3
http://www.gigabyte.comNZXT KRAKEN X62
If cash is tight, there’s nothing wrong with
using the cooler that comes with your CPU
(as long as it’s the retail version – OEMs
don’t have coolers). However, if you want
to overclock, or keep temperatures down
so your machine runs more quietly, water
cooling gets the nod from us. Obviously,
piecing together your own loop is the pro
choice here, although for an easier life, an
all-in-one cooler has a lot going for it. We’ve
seen quite a few of these recently as new
manufacturers enter the market, but the
likes of the Corsair H110 (£110) and NZXT
Kraken X62 (£130) still stand out as the
ones to buy.CPU COOLERS
http://www.nzxt.com £130TOTAL
£290
ADVANCED
it does provide everything you’ll need to
support multi GPUs, PCIe storage, USB
3.1, and more. It even supports memory
up to 3,200MT/s, so you can net
yourself a 10–15 per cent increase in
performance in some cases.ASUS HAS LOADS OF
MONEY AND
RESOURCES TO INVEST
IN BIOS DEVELOPMENTFEATURE
Today’s best upgrades
ASUS PRIME X399
http://www.asus.comIf you’re going with the mighty
powerhouse of Threadripper, you need
a suitable motherboard. We admit,
there’s not a huge selection of X399
boards out there right now (seven in
total), so pickings are slim, but that’s not
to say there’s no choice to be had. In
our opinion, Asus’s Prime X399 is ideal.
For this number of cores, unless you
have very specific needs (overclocking,
more PCIe SSDs, specific storage
solutions, and so on), there’s very little
to justify investing in a pricier mobo.
Asus’s Prime X399 was the board we
chose for our recent workstation
rendering machine, because of these
very reasons. We wanted to keep an eye
on the price, yet still have access to a
fantastically smooth BIOS for additional
tweaking, overclocking, and more if we
needed it. Throw in the gorgeously
understated colour scheme and design
of the board, plus cooling and storage
support, and it’s an all-around no-brainer. That said, one
of the biggest reasons
we chose this board is
due to market share. Why?
Simply put, Asus has loads of money
and resources to invest in BIOS
development, pushing the boundaries
of memory support in the process—and
good memory support is still key to
unlocking the real potential of AMD’s
potent processor. Stability is also an
important factor, and you can max both
of those factors out using this powerful
motherboard. Throw in the strong
feature set and raw power on offer, and
this is an easy recommendation to make.